Xiaomi India has denied exiting the offline market for smart TV sales. The rebuttal comes in response to a claim made by Super Plastronics Pvt Ltd chief executive officer, Avneet Singh Marwah, that Xiaomi had closed its offline television sales last year, apparently because it had ceased to serve as a viable business option.
In a statement shared with FE over email, a company spokesperson said that, “Xiaomi has a strong retail presence across multiple offline channels besides Mi stores and Mi Homes including multi-brand stores, Mi Preferred Partners as well as large format stores like Reliance, Vijay Sales, Poorvika, Sangeetha, etc,” adding that brick-and-mortar channels have been contributing to 50 percent of its smart TV sales in the country.
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Underscoring the importance of offline to showcase “the superior quality of Xiaomi smart TVs, and compare it with other marginal, fragmented players,” the spokesperson reiterated that Xiaomi will continue to strengthen its offline business across all categories, smart TVs included, giving the best experience and choices across channels to its customers.
In an exclusive interview with FE, the SPPL CEO had claimed that Xiaomi had shut offline sales of its smart TVs in India last year, and was only selling online now. “How can they [claim to] be number one when the online market is only 32 percent [and they are not selling offline]? It’s all a marketing gimmick,” Marwah had said.
In the same interview, he called out OnePlus and Realme for silently exiting the smart TV market, after creating a lot of hype on the back of aggressive pricing, a strategy that might have worked in the short-term but in the long run, they were “losing a lot of money.”
“Because they are majorly mobile phone companies, they were not able to pump that sort of money into TVs. They couldn’t have more losses, so they stopped operations,” Marwah said, adding that “that’s the problem with just branding your products. You can come, test [the waters] and leave if it doesn’t go well.”
Xiaomi however seems to be doing well. The company witnessed a strong uptake in the 43 inch-4K segment during the festive season in 2023 which grew by up to 75 percent (Y-O-Y) on the back of the cricket World Cup and Diwali.
“With the IPL season setting, we expect a surge in the demand for larger screens suited for group viewing, particularly 55 inches and above,” the spokesperson concluded.
